Pat / Pam
Pat Butcher. Pam St. Clements. Whatever name is familiar I’m sure you know who I’m on about; she was the one who would make a good candidate for Gastric band surgery. Need another hint? Well, she was Pauline Flowers arch-nemesis / sometimes best friend, of course, and in trouble more times per episode than any character ever was (apart from possibly Dot’s disastrous son Nasty Nick). Whatever you know her as, you know her as the backbone of never-less-than-grim English soap Eastenders. You also know her as the originator of the largest earrings on planet earth. Bar none…
The first time I saw Pat’s earrings, as a young boy, I was shocked. I had never come across such things before. Never, in all my eight or nine years of living, had I seen such wondrous massive dangly things.
I don’t remember what Pam—sorry, Pat—was doing, but whatever was happening was making her earrings swing about dangerously. I have a feeling she may have been either having a fight with her husband or was in bed with him, which seemed bizarre to me, as it was the middle of the afternoon in the episode: either way, to an eight year-old it looked like one and the same thing. As the fight intensified I had to hide behind the sofa. Pat’s earrings were swinging with such force that they looked as dangerous as two great fiery chandeliers! (They were orange, and with my imagination working over-time it didn’t take much to imagine them as flaming.)